After his retirement from the NFL, a troubled Seau tried to keep up appearances with his vast networks of friends and acquaintances. But his inner life was in shambles.
After his retirement from the

Friends estimated that a bad investment in Ruby Tuesday franchises was costing him $60,000 to $70,000 a month after his retirement.

In court documents, Seau stated he initially invested more than $300,000 in the project, purchasing the rights to launch 15 Ruby Tuesdays in Southern California over a five-year period. Two opened, the economy crashed, the restaurants cratered. According to Ted Davenport, Seau’s business partner in the venture, they eventually were able to get out of their franchise deal with Ruby Tuesday, but remained on the hook for leases.

Seau’s own restaurant in Mission Valley was hurting.

“Seau’s really struggled the past two years because the Chargers didn’t have very good seasons. Their home games were blacked out. All of that impacted business,” said Bette Hoffman, the former longtime executive director of the Junior Seau Foundation.

And in August 2011, Seau’s faced competition from a new sports-theme restaurant that opened in the shopping center, The Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery.

In order to keep pace, Hoffman said, she and Seau knew that the restaurant would have to undergo an extensive renovation, which would cost at least $200,000. Seau’s lease would be up for renewal in January 2013, and Hoffman told Seau that he was facing a difficult decision — to remain in business or to close.

“Ruby Tuesday was failing, Seau’s was failing,” Hoffman said. “He didn’t want to close any of his restaurants because they were such a sense of pride to him. We were fighting to get everything turned around; we were struggling to stay afloat.”

In 2011, Seau took a $1.2 million loan against the value of his Oceanside house, which he had purchased for $3.2 million in cash in 2005.

Average bet: $38,800

Amid all of his mounting financial pressures, Seau began gambling heavily using lines of credit, or “markers,” at Las Vegas casinos, including Bellagio and Caesars Palace.

“I hold my annual foundation bowling tournament in Vegas at the Cosmopolitan,” said Moon. “Junior was a guy that the Cosmopolitan specifically asked me to invite because they knew how much he gambled. They wanted to have him in the building. Most guys who gamble are like that — they aren’t winning.”

Moon said he was told Seau had a $1 million line of credit at the Cosmopolitan.

According to a source with MGM International, owner of Bellagio, over the course of his gambling lifetime, Seau had a net buy-in of $6.8 million for all of the MGM International properties — $4.1 million of which came from markers. The MGM International source said that by the end of November 2010, Seau owed $1.3 million in markers to Bellagio ($500,000) and Caesars Palace ($800,000). His average bet at Bellagio was $38,800.

“You can’t gamble to make money,” that source said. “You need to be super smart, and even those people can’t always beat the system. Anybody who said Junior didn’t have a gambling problem, that he was gambling to make money, is out of their minds. He was borrowing money — hundreds of thousands of dollars — and then he was owing it to the casino.”